[The time disconnect in this story may prove upsetting to some. The content similarly is, possibly, problematic. The question of whether a “light” treatment of this imagined subject is possible is a judgment left to the reader. You can worry about what you write, but you cannot apologize for it.]

“So tell me, tell me. We haven’t talked in like three days. What IS going on?” Sarah leaned over the table, her face almost touching mine she was so excited. She could tell something was up.

“I don’t know where to start almost. It’s so, really really intense, ya know?” I slipped one foot out of my sandal and rubbed the top of my other, the sand was sticking again and making me itch.

“Livie, you go out on a date, a real date just the two of you, which is out there anyway, no one else there? And then we don’t talk for days and days? What happened?” A pause, a dropped voice. “You like okay and everything? Ohmag-d, did he DO anything?”

“It’s fine, Sarah, fine but … really can’t talk here, ya know. My parentals are around….”

“Livie, your father’s been in the field since the sun came up, your mother’s going to be in the Square for hours. Just TELL me, will ya? C’mon!”

Sarah is my best best friend, has been for a long time, months maybe years. Maybe since the last time the Legion came through and we hid in the haystack all night. I am going to tell her, and I shouldn’t make her drag it out of me I guess. She’s right, no parents are here, and the brothers are going to be helping my dad, it’s June, the spring grain is about ready.

“All right, so I’ll tell you already. But you gotta not tell anyone. Cause this is like weird sorta.” Her brow knit. Real fast I’m like, “No, not weird, just like not – it’s just different is all.”

It is hot again, it is almost always hot. The walls of the house are thick and a new coating of mud outside, on the South wall, helps a little but there is no breeze, we are both building sheens of sweat all over, under our dresses and on our faces, under our hair, everywhere. It is the warm season, it will be warm or hot, day and night, for months and months, until Adar at least. What can you do, you just live with it, ignore it.

“So we go down to the Square, ya know, just talking. He is a good talker, I’ll tell ya. Not the usual stuff; some of it is sorta strange, I wasn’t into some of the things but he just kept talking in that real cool voice. You could just close your eyes and float like on the river.”

His face then filled my mind, my voice trailing off. It was so peaceful that I just sat there and I guess I mustabin smiling ‘cause Sarah starts to laugh, snapping her fingers and all. “Liv? Livia? Oh Livia girl, you are drifting away, Livie.”

“Yeah well, that’s the thing, it’s all so soft and dreamy and just so nice and relaxed and, like, real ya know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t so tell me. You guys hold hands that first day?”

“No, though I wudda if he had asked. But he didn’t. No, not that look, I don’t think he’s that way at all, I just think he was relaxed and himself and so was I and it just went the way it went. We walked and talked and then he walked me home and just gave my hand a squeeze and he was gone.”

“So then what?”

“He came by the hut next morning. My mom was still there, they talked. I wasn’t even worried what they said, I just did the chores like usual. And ya know, my mom she pulls me aside and says, maybe you shouldn’t walk to the village with him, he’s got a lot of people upset.”

“Well duh, whattaya think? Darned right upset.” Sarah leaned way over and half-whispered, “Did ya mom say anything about, ya know?”

“What, the Jewish thing? No she just said that people were watching him, I maybe should just stay out by the river if I wanted to talk to him. I think she really liked him, ya know.”

“Did he see the gods in the house altar?”

“Ya, I s’pose, it isn’t like they are hidden or anything. But he doesn’t seem, you know, serious about the religion thing. Said the Legion just didn’t understand where he was coming from. Didn’t seem afraid or anything, just like it was a thing that was his thing.”

“So what did you do, go to the village?”

“Yeah, we walked to the gate and then we just sorta turned and walked past the entry way and around by the old Greek theater and out by the death fire grounds and then we just sorta walked and walked and talked.”

“ What did you talk about so long. He’s sort of old for you, isn’t he? What did you think to talk about if you weren’t, you know….”

“That’s the odd thing. He was talking about the children, and about his father but I don’t think his father lives around here. He came a few months ago and didn’t have parents with him, didn’t have any family, just living down by the river with the other Jews. He said his father sent him here and I asked him why and he just smiled and then he took my hand.”

“Shit, Liv, so you spent the whole day talking and walking and holding hands? Really? Did anyone see you? Balthazar, did he see you, or that worm of a brother or….”

“I don’t know, Sarah, don’t get so worked up. He just walked me home and squeezed my hand and went back down the road. So the next day, he had told me he was having a meeting in the village, near the river and then up the big hill, and if I wanted to I could come. And I did and got there early so maybe we could talk, and there were a lot of people.” I looked down, flicked a fly off the top of my arm, sipped my cup or water; it was warm and tasted like salt.

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, he never came. We all waited a while and then the sun got high and we all went away. That’s all. I haven’t seen him since.” A drop of sweat dripped off my nose and into my cup. “I do wish he would come by. Do you think I should go looking for him, asking? I think it is too forward for a young girl, maybe….”

“So for three days you don’t talk to your best friend, you don’t come to the well or past my house, and you spend it walking around talking to or waiting for some Hebrew? That’s sicko, Liv, ya know that? We don’t even know where he came from or what he does or where he sleeps….”

Sarah stood up and leaned against the jamb, looking out into the yard; two goats chewed little sprouts of green that they had somehow missed before. The water trough was empty, my job that I still needed to do and now the sun was very high and I would have to carry the water from the well or maybe, if I did not want to talk to anyone, from the river even though it is a few zillion cubits further past the olive grove.

“He’s building the barn for the Consul down in the hollow by the agora. He says he likes to build things, it is peaceful. His hands are soft but he says he builds lots of things, it’s his job.”

“Well, Liv, you certainly know how to have no fun at all for three days and still manage to drop out of sight. That is about the most boring gabfest I have ever had with woman or beast.” Sarah kissed me a whisp of a kiss on the top of my head, I think just trying to avoid the perspiration everywhere else.

“I gotta get firewood and help my sister. I’ll see you tomorrow. Stay out of trouble, y’hear?” A smile and she was gone. I grabbed a bucket, ran my middle finger across our family protecting idol in the niche by the doorway, and swung myself out into the noonday heat heading for the river.

I did not hear from him or see him for days. I began to think he had left town, or had tired of me, found me too young, found me too dull, found me unable to discuss things he wanted to discuss, and it was true, he said things that I could not really understand, they were soothing and I loved hearing him talk but afterwards I just did not remember what he said, or what I said, or what I should do, or remember. I began to feel hurt, although he had given me no sign of anything beyond simple friendship. But he was of the age and I was of the age and it was bold to walk together and we had done so, and such things usually had a meaning, if only because others thought so.

Then early one morning, we had just arisen, father and the boys had yet to go down the valley to the grain, it was almost time to harvest and they were nervous and spent time with the field even though there was not yet anything to do. That morning two men of the Legion had come to the house and we were all nervous immediately. The Legion was always polite and respectful until, for reasons one could almost never figure out, they would take your goats or beat you or even burn your house or take someone away and then maybe they would not come back, or they would come back with bruises and would not tell you what happened.

Father went outside to speak with them, at some distance from the door, and when I tried to pretend to have chores there my mother pulled me into the house by my hair and hissed for me to be not look at anything. The men of the Legion then went and stood by the road and father came into the house and told mother and the boys and Ruth to leave us alone, my father and I, and they of course did so and looked back towards our house as they walked into the garden and squatted on the ground together.

“You have been seen with a young man?” It was an answer disguised as a question.

“Oh? Perhaps.” I looked up and father was waiting, angry. I had no wish to play a game with him. “For two days I took a walk with a boy who was talking to my friends at the well in the village. That is all I can think of, father.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“A boy not from here; he came a while ago. He has no family; maybe a father somewhere. He is a carpenter.” I paused, then added, “he is very nice and we just spoke together.” I knew my father trusted me, as most fathers trusted most daughters, as the gods allowed the fathers of sinning girls to do the most terrible things, in fact the gods demanded it.

Father put hands on both my shoulders. “Do you know where he is?”

“No. No, of course not. I do not even know where he lives.” I paused and weighed the next words, then said “He likely lives down by the river in the village. With the – rest of the Jews.”

“These men are looking for him.” I started to speak, was interrupted. “Never mind anything except tell me if you have any idea where he might be found.”

“No, father.” I wanted to ask more but did not.

“I am going to speak to the men of the Legion. You stay here in the house. Do not come out. Do not look out the window or through the door. Find something to do at the hearth. If the men of the Legion wish to talk to you, I will bring you out to them and you will tell them the truth of things. Do you hear?”

I often just drove past the sign and didn’t think very much about it. Strange name, but just a street sign, green and at my visual periphery. Months later, driving to work in a chilly snow-fall, I saw a bundled-up figure trudging down the center line of Huron Avenue towards the bus-stop. I pulled alongside and cranked down the window, my face absorbing fine pellets of coldness.

“Hop in.”

A hesitation. Wide blue eyes scanned from between wool cap and scarf.

“Come on, you look frozen. I’ll drive you to the Square. Or into the City if that’s where you’re going.”

A long few moments passed, moments of hesitation while my car, my suit, my aspect was scanned for, I imagined, warning signs of danger. Then: “Okay, thanks.” She slid onto the front seat, accompanied by an aura of cold air. “Thank you! Don’t usually do this, but it’s so darned cold.”

“Well, I don’t usually pick up people either. Funny how when there are extremes, like cold or snow or rain, or any emergency, people talk when normally they just ignore each other.”

She unwrapped her scarf, pulled off her cap, glanced over, half smiling. Fine red hair framed her face; a small brownish beauty mark set off the redness of her cheek. “Yeah, I noticed that, too,” she replied.

My car sloshed and slid down the street. “Where to?”

“Just the Square, okay?” A pause. “I work in the Bookstore.”

“Fine. Going right past it,” I lied.

An open space of time and words, each thinking for an impersonal remark.

“So where do you live? Where were you coming from?”

“Oh, I’m living with a friend temporarily. Down that side street, Thingvalla Road. You know it?”

“No, not really; just seen the sign. Funny name….”

I left her in front of the Bookstore that dominated the Square. The wind filled the car, swallowing her thank you. I did not ask her name, but remembered her eyes that shone from reddened skin and hair that reflected the sparkle of snow.

A few months later: the first really Spring-like day. The moisture and boggy smell of drying earth were tinged with heat and carried by a mild and constant Southern breeze. I was early and traffic was light. As a lark, really, nothing more, I turned right onto Thingvalla Road.

The entire street was only a few houses long, gray and brown triple-deckers typical of working-class New England neighborhoods, square porches in front, windows set back into the façade mindlessly reflected the dark blue sky and blocking out any glimpse of the interiors. I drove slowly to the dead end, marked by a small widening or turn-around, but saw no one. Ugly little front yards of beaten-down dirt, no more than brown plots waiting for the greening of Spring, running back from the side-walk to the low red-brick foundations and uneven wooden stairs. All the houses stared out quietly. A silent street, devoid of responses. I drove into the City, still too early for the start of the work-day.

In May, when my family was away visiting my in-laws, and I had stayed at home to work on a case, Sunday dawned gray, muggy and dull. I drifted around the house in sweater and jeans, unable to focus enough to drive into the office. After a while, I took my Chevy out for a drive, and found myself at the corner of Huron and Thingvalla Road. Turning right, I drove down Thingvalla. A few children in T-shirts rode rusty bicycles in slow circles. Two tossed a baseball in lazy arcs. Sure that I wasn’t conspicuous in my gray Chevy, I pulled to the curb near the end of the street and turned off the engine. The entire sweep of the street was shrunken into my rear-view mirror: children, muddy non-lawns, a pile of shrub cuttings near the end of one driveway, two teen-agers soaping a brown Plymouth, an old lady in a black dress walking bow-legged down the sidewalk . Two small maples with green-tipped boughs flanked the center of the block. I sat for about an hour, slumped down in the seat and staring through my mirror at the lethargy of the scene. The girl with red hair did not appear. I drove to the office and attacked the contents of my desk.

Next morning, it was pouring heavily and without hope of respite. I loaded my briefcase, umbrella, and raincoat into the car and pulled away from the driveway. At the first corner, I stopped to move everything from the seat beside me into the back, and then drove deliberately and a bit too quickly to Thingvalla Road. I paused at the corner, for how long I’m not sure, until the honking behind me pushed me ever so slowly around the corner. I drove down the street at low speed, peering left and right onto the porches for my red-headed acquaintance, or for anyone else who was bundled up against the rain. No one appeared except for a man in work-clothes who jumped into a pick-up and roared off without need of my assistance. I turned and sat, engine idling, for a few minutes, but the houses held their secrets. Through one window, I could see white gauzy curtains and a round pull-ring on an old roller-shade. Within this frame, a lamp on a table, its finial golden glass. Shapes moved in the room, unclear and unidentifiable. I drove into the City.

About a week later, I realized that I had become determined to learn more about who lived on this mundane street; I imagined it as a hobby of sorts, a sociological inquiry, the study of the microcosm the better to understand the whole. I learned that Town Hall sold a “police list” for five dollars, disclosing occupants of each street, house-by-house.

Thingvalla Road had fourteen house and 151 people. The oldest was 91, a retired hair dresser living at number eight. There were sixty-six children. I could not identify my red-haired friend, if indeed she had ever made the list. The workman with the pick-up truck was equally as elusive: perhaps Hurley at number fifteen, perhaps Johnstone at nineteen. The bow-legged old lady must have been Mrs. Antonelli, aged 78, “housewife.”

It was now light well into evening. On the way home, I drove slowly down Thingvalla Road, the police list opened on the seat next to me, imagining occupants, putting them onto the various floors, inventing appropriate dinners for them—starch for laborers, hot dogs for the junior high school students, a six-pack with a slug of beef jerky for John Hurley. I decided I didn’t much care for Hurley, with his over-hanging belly and common demeanor. I found myself looking forward to the weekend.

Next Saturday, I packed a thermos of coffee and two swiss cheese sandwiches (on white with lots of butter) and parked at the very end of Thingvalla Road, car sideways in the turn-around so I had a view of the entire street from the driver-side window. I was early, seven in the morning; no sense missing anything, you never know when something interesting is going to pop. I had torn out the page for Thingvalla from the police list, cut away the other streets and pasted Thingvalla onto a stiff card-board so that it would not get dog-eared.

A few people seemed to leave for work around 7:30, all turning toward the bus stop without backwards glance. The mailman came between eight and nine; earlier than to my house in my fancy suburb, I realized. His small bag emptied in fifteen minutes and he was gone. Children, all boys, drifting into the street and clustered to no purpose. Mothers in nondescript dresses or black stretch pants, some with small kids in tow, walked towards the store on Cross Street and returned with unbalanced brown paper bags. One child carried an enormous bag of potato chips clasped in front of his stomach, top open, pudgy hand stuffing gold clumps into his greasy maw.

A few cars came and went, cargo and occupants discharged into driveways hidden from my vantage point. A truck delivered oil just before noon. I sipped coffee and ate half a sandwich. After lunch, some residents brought out beach chairs, gaudy plastic webbing woven between rusty metal tubes, and planted them at the edges of the sidewalk. Two middle-aged men sat facing me, passing a large bottle of Coca Cola between them. The breeze carried voices to me in bits and shards. Red Sox. New bus schedules. Paint the porch green why dontcha? Jane Fond has no tits. The women sat with their backs to the sun; one knit. Their communication was lost in their jowls and house-dresses.

About 2:30 I needed to go to the bathroom. I hadn’t thought of that. As I sat uncomfortably, wishing I hadn’t drunk the coffee and considering my options, two men approached my car.

“What’s the story, sport?” The smaller spoke; the larger lurked for effect.

“Nothing much. Just sitting and enjoying the day.” No good. Makes no sense. “Actually, I’m – writing a book about the town and I’m trying to get a feel for it.”

“Didn’t I see this car parked here the other day?”

“Oh. Well.. I doubt it. Did drive by early in the week, and decided to come back and spend the day today. Maybe you saw me then. Monday or Tuesday, maybe….”

“Yeah, well, how about trying another street? You’re making my wife nervous.”

The bigger man moved alongside the car and rubbed his right fist into his left palm with a circular motion. I was about to ask him if he got that idea from a bad movie, but decided against it.

“Sure, sure, no problem.” I turned over the engine. “Have a good day,” I called, almost gaily. “No offense meant,” I suggested. I rolled slowly down the street and drove home, shaking.

When my family went to the beach house in mid-June, to get in some vacation before the summer rentals began, I went to the Ryder Truck outlet and rented a panel truck with dark frosted windows in the back doors and spent a frantic day buying equipment. I loaded into the back of the truck a portable toilet the size of a bucket, a can opener, a lot of food that didn’t require heating, a couple of huge water bottles sans cooler, a flashlight lantern, a portable phone with two power packs (they now have these phones where you don’t need a booth any more, they are huge and expensive but this one fit the bill), a portable radio with extra batteries, a few paperbacks, some toiletries and body wipes and a couple of sleeping bags from Sears.

I called the local police to tell them not to disturb the Monitoring Vehicle that the Air Pollution Commission was going to place on Thingvalla Road for a few weeks. I confirmed with my secretary that I was going camping but would call in; off with the guys, family down on the Cape. I called my wife and told her that I’d be with Johnny and Tyler up at Tyler’s cabin in New Hampshire as we had discussed tentatively the other evening, but would check in when I could get to a pay phone, and thanks for understanding as I had not gotten away for some fishing and hanging out for, God it must be four or five years.

That night I drove to the turn-around at the end of Thingvalla Road, orienting my truck between houses and with a view of the street from the rear windows. Quietly I unscrewed the license plates and put them inside the truck. I placed orange plastic cones in front and in back of my truck, propped a sign in the front window which read “Air Monitoring Study—in case of questions call 556-2020” and set about taping a dark summer-weight blanket behind the two front seats to block any view into the back of the van. By now exhausted, I checked the locked doors, dropped down the small curtain that covered the two small rear windows, and almost collapsed onto the bed rolls. My sweat soaked into the fabric, and I then realized that was not likely a good long-term choice in my enclosed space. I fought down the temptation to crack the rear door open for ventilation and then tried to fall asleep. It took a really long time.

I awoke with a start, stiff and strangely chilled, to a rhythmic thump on the side of the truck. I was afraid to move until I heard the voices of children nearby. I slowly straightened myself under the sleeping bag, crawled to the rear doors and pulled open a corner of the curtain. For a while, I heard only the periodic thump on the side of the truck and saw nothing but an empty street. Then, a thump, a cry of “Oh, shit!,” and a ball rolled rapidly away, down the sidewalk, followed by two boys running full tilt, their scabby legs pumping from dirty shorts.

I used the toilet, closing the cover quickly but not quickly enough; the space was more confining than I had anticipated and had no circulation. I ate a hard roll followed by a can of soda for breakfast. The sun was going to be hot. Even though I had selected a light tan truck and it was only June, the heat began to build. By mid-day, no one stirred on Thingvalla Road, and I sat in the back, afraid to open the doors, stripped to my shorts, with rivulets of sweat meandering down my face and chest and dripping and pooling on the rubber floor mats.

No air moved in the back of the truck. Enough light came through the dark glass in the rear doors, or leaked around the curtain barrier, so that I could read my paperbacks, but after ten minutes the sweat began to sting my eyes. I turned around and concentrated on the street instead. At four o’clock the men began to return home, the arm-pits of their green or gray work-shirts stained dark by perspiration. The smell of charcoal fires somehow penetrated the truck, sickening me. I couldn’t eat, but forced myself to drink a warm 7-Up. The sun finally sank, and children ran up and down the street, yelling, well into the night. The heat ascended from the street, but dallied in the torpid pockets of my truck. After midnight, unable to sleep, I opened the rear doors a few inches, feeling the heat and smells roll out into the darkness.

Days and nights became monotonous patterns. I would awake, eat lightly, observe the morning’s activity. By mid-day, the heat sometimes would drive even the children from the pavement. Nothing but heat and my own silent cursing would fill this time. Soon, persistent odor of urine and waste and sweat and old food filled my lungs and mind. All my clothes had been sweat-soaked, and those that had dried were stiff to the touch and sour to the nose. I began to remain naked, because it was easier.

Each week-night, the men would come home, change into shorts and sit on porches and smoke and drink soda and beer. Their conversations were lost to the darkness, but the hum of voices floated across my mind and taunted my awareness. The younger children played hide-and-seek while the older ones huddled behind my truck and smoked; mostly cigarettes, although the occasional sweet counterpoint of marijuana leaked through the seams of my capsule. The acrid smells lingered for me, long after the teenagers had gone.

One evening, someone pissed on the side of the truck; the metal rang with the force of his stream. Very late one night, a convertible pulled into the turn-around and its two occupants kissed and petted each other in silence of almost an hour. I sat, naked, staring at them but did not get aroused. When they pulled away, I thought I briefly glimpsed the faces of two boys in the yellow glow of the street-lights.

On Tuesday, June 28, my watch stopped, and I started to mark the days in small scratches on the inside wall of my truck. I had given up the idea of calling my family every third or fourth day. If they were looking for me now, that was all right – I knew they couldn’t find me. But, I still wanted to be home when they returned from vacation.

I hardly ate. I could feel myself getting thinner, sweat continually oozing from my body. I took to sleeping naked also, prone on the rubber floor of the truck to soak up its coolness. The odor inside soon turned rancid, but I dared open the back doors only very late at night, slightly and only for a few minutes. I gave up exercising; the heat and confined space made real effort impossible. Twice, late at night when I could not stand it, I slipped out of the truck and walked purposefully down the street to work out my stiffness. Once I pissed in the bushes, and one night even dumped my bucket into a nearby sewer.

Sometimes I read. I read something by Thomas Mann, something by Harold Robbins. I started and put down an anthology of poem. Mostly, I looked out of the truck onto Thingvalla Road. Its patterns soothed me – the boring sameness of its days and nights. The adults had no imagination, no texture to their hours – the same cigarettes burned the same holes into the night from the same chairs on the same porches. Even the children were boring – the same coarse language, the same games with the same playmates. One teen-aged boy from number twelve stood at his bedroom window late one night, the light to his back, and seemed to masturbate. I turned off my lantern and tried to do the same, but I rubbed myself raw in the heat and could not get anything to happen.

A couple of times, my attention snapped out of the window when I was sure I had glimpsed the red-haired girl, but my concentration was so poor, the light at night so unreliable, that I could not be certain. One evening, a girl with red hair climbed the porch steps of the nearest house, her tight slacks creeping into her body. I was so startled that I opened the rear doors of my truck without thinking; I quickly shut them again, but had the sense that I might have been observed. That night, I became unsure that it had been she.

My three weeks were coming to an end. I felt that I had, at last, unlocked the secret of that street: it was as prosaic and uninspired as it seemed. Ageless, shapeless people in work-shirts spawned crude and listless children destined to replace their parents on these same square porches, drinking beers and lighting Camels or Phillies while their own children hid in the same driveways and sneaked the same smokes and showed each other their genitals and were trained to walk to the buses and work in the same garages or factories. The symmetry made me confident. Here at last was a street that hid nothing. It was exactly what it had seemed that first Spring day that I had driven down it. I even ceased to care that I could not locate, isolate the girl with red hair.

On my last night, I packed the few things I had brought with me, cramming all the food and waste paper into a large green trash bag. The toilet was almost full again. I sat on the stink in an effort to top it off. Then I piled the books neatly in a corner and lay on the floor in the heat, trying to sleep.

The swelter that day had been particularly intense and a hazy inversion blanketed Thingvalla Road, suspending a corona around the street lamps. Finally, after midnight when all the porches and windows were dark, I opened the back of the truck. The night had cooled. I moved my face into the stream of air, my sweat drying into my beard almost immediately.

Evenly, deliberately, I filled my lungs with the breaths of summer, my body and mind cleansed and reassured by each intake. As I sucked the night into myself, I thought I heard a noise to my left, up on a porch. I froze, thought I sensed two figures returning my stare, felt a hint of red hair, then slowly backed into the truck and pulled the doors almost shut. I waited a long time, until I was sure nothing was moving and then snapped the lock on the doors as silently as I could. Exhaling in relief, I turned to see my reading lantern lighting the corner of the truck. Stupid of me, to have left the light on when the door was open, but it was my last night on Thingvalla Road and therefore it didn’t matter very much at all, not any more.

* * * * * * * *

“Jesus shit. Look at that!”

“Is that a person in there?”

“WAS that a person, don’t ya mean?”

“Christ, what a stink….”

“Not enough to identify him by.”

“The teeth. Forensics, they can always figure it out by the teeth.”

“Whattadaya think the poor motha was doin’ in a truck in the middle of the night, anyway?”

The Sergeant moved around the charred side of the van and saw the blackened rag on the ground, below the gas tank intake. The tank cap was on its side, a few yards away.

“Hey, Cap,” he yelled. Lookit this.”

In his bedroom, behind the dirty lace curtain, John Hurley belched loudly and backed one step away from the window frame.

“Come back to bed, John,” the girl whined. “It’s the middle of the night.” Her red hair covered the pillow, reflections from the street lamp dropping highlights here and there.

“Yeah, yeah, in a minute. I wanna see what’s happenin’ down on the street.”

He belched again, and he smiled.

One day Hank found a penny. It shined up at him, and he put it in his pocket and ran into the house. His mother looked up from the peas she was shelling and said that it was good to find money and, yes, he could keep it. Hank asked if the person who lost the penny might look for it and be angry. Hank was still young enough to value a penny.

His mother thought that the owner of the penny would not be a problem. “How will he know that you have his particular penny, anyway,” she asked.

Although often she was stinting in her attention, and usually concentrated on shelling her peas or rolling out her batter, she paused in this instance to add another penny to Hank’s palm, and to admire his diligence in finding his penny. She even stroked his hair.

After that, Hank walked around looking at the ground, with a slight stoop in his gait. He found other coins, and once outside the drugstore a dollar bill, and he put them all in a wooden butter box with a splintered end retrieved from the grocer’s trash.

* * * * * * * *

Henry was having trouble writing his lab report, and spread his notes and drawings over his desk and table and onto his bed. The floor of the dormitory was chilled to his touch as he bent to place more recent figures and sketches around his feet in a tight arc. A draft rippled the pages, and Henry moved the corner of a large Jim Beam bottle onto one edge as an anchor; the bottle had been filled nearly to the top with pennies, and Henry had to strain to pull it across the tiled floor.

Standing to evaluate his arrangement, Henry carefully tapped the edges of each sheet with flicks of his finger until all were square and even in relationship to each other sheet and to the square corners of the bed, desk and floor tiles. Some pages were in piles, and seemed disorderly. He opened a drawer and took out a few small boxes. Selecting one, he undid the rubber band and thumbed through the various paper clips, selecting six or eight of identical size to place on his papers. He resealed and replaced the box in the drawer, putting the box of larger clips, rubber bands (narrow) and rubber bands (wide) and tacks on top. Henry felt satisfied with how those boxes fit together squarely in the drawer, on top of the larger boxes containing his staples, post cards, bottle caps and pennies.

It was a shame that he needed to use drawer space for those rolled pennies in the old White Owl cigar box, but his foot locker finally had been filled with other cigar boxes with pennies and, of course, the beer cans took up so much space no matter how neatly you placed them in rows. The spaces left open by the untouching arcs of the cans Henry had filled with rolls of pennies placed vertically. He had considered collecting and rolling half-dollars which would have more fully filled those spaces, but he had been saving pennies for so long that the mere thought seemed disloyal.

After three semesters at State, Henry finally was beginning to enjoy the campus. Although he stayed to himself, and worked on his collections, he enjoyed going to sports events and concerts; in fact, all the programs for these events were in chronological order on his closet floor. His job at the movie theater took some of his time, but lately Mr. LoBianco began letting him take home the torn ticket stubs. That had greatly boosted his stub collection, which now filled some of the shoe boxes under his bed.

Once Henry stood at the edge of a dance floor at a Sophomore mixer, an old corduroy jacket hanging on his square shoulders and away from is thin body, and had smiled at some of the girls. They passed nervously by him, and Henry imagined the sweat beading in his pencil mustache that he carefully raised to give his uneventful face more character. He left half-way through the evening, dancing with no one. On the steps of the gym, his glasses fogged in the early winter air; the music could be heard clearly from inside, and three girls ran past him up the stairs. He imagined that their laughter was about him.

After that, Henry went to parties and dances only at their very end, dressed in jeans or overalls. He would pretend to be part of the clean-up crew, and thus could fill his bags with bottles and caps for his collection. Some of the girls would chug their remainders in an effort to be helpful.

Henry liked lab reports. Even though his measurements often were imprecise and did not match expected results, he was able to type them in precisely prescribed formats, and he bound them all with blue covers. They were on the shelf above his desk, between the green English themes and the yellow history reports. Henry glanced along the shelf at last year’s brown, red and gray covered folders.

Henry wrote quickly on his typewriter once he began. The contents of the report, after all, were not very important, and he was comfortable with all the Cs he received. It was not like he planned to go to graduate school; just a simple degree for a simple job. Henry’s pleasures lay elsewhere.

He leaned back in his chair, and thought again of the plan. A house with a den, a door with a lock. No one could enter except him. His wife, blonde and petite, would leave his cup of soup on a table by the door and retire. Then he could open the door and get his soup and not be disturbed. Inside, the room would be larger than you might expect to find in a modest white colonial. In fact, its shelves and cabinets stretched many yards in each direction. All the labels were black on tan, lettered in a calligrapher’s hand that made full use of the power of India ink. All the boxes rolled out on smooth slides or casters, and the vivid colors danced in the intense florescent light: beer cans, cigar wrappers, postage stamps, paper money from around the world, bottle caps, tobacco tins. At one end, an easy chair facing the older classic part of his collection: rolls of pennies, by now thousands of rolls, behind a waist-high plastic barrier, a mountain of rolls, a brown hillside of neatly, tightly rolled coins. One day a week he would maintain this part of his collection, moving among the rolls and resealing the ends with long strips of scotch tape.

When Bill from across the hall knocked on his door, calling out for dinner, Henry’s room disappeared around him. He was hungry, but remained silent until Bill left. Recently Henry had begun to take his meals late; fewer people were there to stare at him as he poked through the barrels at the tray return.

* * * * * * * *

“What do you mean that we’ll sleep on the fold-out?”

“I mean, I need the space.” His fingers moved back nervously through his thin brownish hair and held onto his neck; he stretched back against his hand to fight against the tension.
Terri stood up from the table and walked around the kitchen. She shook her head, finding no words. “Do you really, really think that two grown people with a perfectly good bedroom ought to sleep in their living room just to make room for a collection of — of — junk?” Her voice, normally strident in disbelief, had this time a flat monotone that frightened Henry.

“Look, the living room is fine. It’s not like we ever have anyone visit.”

She looked up. “Is that MY fault?”

“Not a matter of fault, a matter of fact,” he explained. “It’s like having three bedrooms, not two, that’s all. Why have rooms designed by someone for THEIR idea of living? Why not have rooms for how WE live?”

“Live? Live?” Her voice rose again to its accustomed incredulous stridency. “You call this a way to live? There is so much crap in this apartment, I don’t know whether to shit or go blind. I come back from the office, you’ve been here all day, and I figure at least today he will make dinner, but no. You haven’t made dinner for a month. Instead, I gotta run a fucking obstacle course of your shit. And now it’s what—bottles? What’s wrong with the ten million goddamned cans? Why now bottles? You nuts? I think you’re nuts.”

Patience, let’s explain it again, sometimes Terri forgets. “Look, Ter, it’s just a hobby. You knew I collected when we met. You thought it was funny.”

“A carton of match books is funny. A closet of wire hangers without clothes is not funny. A carton of shirt cardboards next to my dresser is not funny. Used toothpaste tubes isn’t even quaint. It’s sick shit, Henry. Sick, sick, sick!”

Terri started to clear the dishes, then put them back on the table. “Henry, Henry, what’s happening. Why do you do this? Why do I stay here? Each morning I get up and I say, this isn’t happening, this is too absurd. But it IS happening, Henry. What are you doing? What are you doing with your life, with OUR life? Are you going to ever work again? Are you looking? All day alone, what do you do? Do you call for jobs? Your unemployment is running out. Then how do we afford to live? Or do you –fuck with this crap all day? Henry? Henry? Talk to me Henry‼”

There were some crumbs on the table. Henry swept them with the edge of one hand into his other palm. Their sharp texture was pleasing.

“Henry? Oh for Chrissakes! Henry, I’m going to the movies with Helen. Then I’m coming home and going to sleep in my own bed. Do you hear me, my own bed. BED. BED!”

Terri paused but there was no response so she left the room. Minutes later, the front door closed. Silence, She was gone. “Good,” thought Henry. Good that she is gone. Good because there aren’t enough hours in the day to do what needs to be done. So much to organize, to handle, to arrange. Neatening up the dinner dishes in a stack, Henry walks, smiling, into the bedroom. He strips the bedding, and carries the linen into the living room. By the time Terri returns, she’ll be so tired she won’t care where she sleeps. The square flat expanse of mattress lies before him. Its potential calls to him, and he sees clearly what shall be done. With new surfaces to fill, Henry can expand once more. Even now, he has stored several trash bags in the basement. Now he can bring them upstairs, empty them and arrange their contents onto the bed. And when Terri returns home and he shows her, Henry is sure that she will understand.

* * * * * * * * * *

Old Hank moved stiffly in the dawn chill that permeated the kitchen of the farmhouse on the hill. Although he had lived in it for twenty years, ever since his mother’s death had given him enough money to buy, finally buy, a home suitable for his hobbies, he never got used to how the wood stove took so long to bite into the chill each morning, particularly since it heated so intently once it was well-fired.

Old Hank – the kids in town called him that on those few occasions each year that he went down to Mort’s to restock – carefully dunked yesterday’s tea bag into the cup; a penny saved was a penny earned, and since he collected the printed tabs at the end of the tea bag string he instinctively pulled the string through the staple to disengage it. In the decades since Terri left him his palate had fallen to the simplest of levels; tea and toast, toast and cheese, one or two chops and a potato for dinner. Old Hank always was too busy to bother much with cooking, anyway.

Each morning the ritual was reenacted, although Old Hank knew the ending, knew it as well as he knew the number of bottle caps in the four hundred and twelve shoe boxes in the attic. Each morning he would mentally list his collections, and pretend to decide which ones would occupy him for that day. The pennies were no longer any good; they were in the floor-less basement, too heavy to move around in any meaningful way, too damp to the touch to be pleasing. Besides, the bugs were eating the wrappers and the yellowed tape was drying off the end of the rolls, and sometimes when Old Hank picked up a handful of rolls the coins would dribble free and go rolling along the dark earth. With the arthritis in his bones, Old Hank had a devil of a time picking them back up, although of course he would never quit and leave even one on the basement floor; that was what was good about having them rolled, you knew exactly how may there were so you would also know exactly how many were missing.

Smooth stones? Postage stamps with flowers, racetrack programs, baseball programs, graduation programs, fifty-four separately sorted categories of programs; not enough to sink your teeth into, really.

Of course, that was the problem all along, the problem he noticed about twelve years ago when he went down to Nashua for the first time to attend one of those collector shows. No matter what he had collected for all of those years, no matter how many rooms he filled with his collections, so full that the ten-room house and the barn were bulging and he had taken to sleeping on a cot again, in the hallway, just as he had shortly after Terri had left him…. But there seemed to be a collector at the show specializing on each separate thing, and that person’s collection was so much grander than his own. The bottle man displayed many bottles that Old Hank had never even seen, and the books of photographs showed even more. The beer can man said he had eleven thousand beer cans at his own home, including nine hundred and forth-five different brands; Old Hank had driven quickly home, and when the dawn arrived and he had finished counting he knew that he just couldn’t measure up.

Of course, strangely, each of these people only seemed to collect one single thing. At the stamp section he thought that he had found a kindred spirit or to, but he soon realized that the envelopes and post-cards were all different aspects of a single collection of postal materials, and not truly different at all.

Although until then he had collected for sheer pleasure, he now found himself awake most nights, worrying about all his inferior collections. He felt like a failure whenever opening one up, and for three or four days actually stayed in bed without resorting even once; and this with several cartons of rubber bands askew in the very next bedroom!

Then Old Hank found the secret of his unique new collections, collections so special that no one in the world would ever be able to rival them. Old Hank had become the ultimate of specialists, and all at once he had stopped sweating and starving himself. In fact, he found new need for the energy he got from his dinners, and he doubled his rations just to be sure.
Old Hank placed his teacup in the center of his toast plate after he had scraped all the crumbs into his pocket. He placed the plate in the corner of the sink, exactly opposite his dinner plate from last night. He climbed the stairs slowly, sliding his feet on the bare treads, lightly toeing every third or fourth riser just to be sure his footing was sound. At the end of the hall he unlocked the door to the main bedroom and bolted it behind him. Seated at the table he had placed just in front of the doorway, he picked up an empty mason jar, have released the top and waited.

He shifted, felt the warmth of the sun obliquely cutting across his face and chest from the uncurtained window, and then tried to relax his body and let it come. Soon, he has able carefully to uncap the bottle, and deposit a soft passage of belched gas. Quickly he recapped and replaced the jar, a trace of a smile edging his face.

It was Thursday, so he could clip his nails on both hands and feet. These remains he swept into an empty dishwasher carton he had picked up in front of a neighboring farm years before. Remembering, the toast crumbs went into a large Tupperware jug.

It was a sunny day, and Old Hank felt good. He couldn’t really wait for tomorrow and besides, one day’s growth didn’t much matter, did it? Pulling the mirror forward, he carefully trimmed his few hairs and let the ends fall onto a white sheet of paper; leaning forward, he carefully clipped his nose-hairs as high as he could reach into his nostrils with his little scissors, and then stood and took off his bathrobe. After trimming his chest hair, he stretched each arm over the paper in turn, cutting carefully because once, last month, he had nicked something badly and he hadn’t been able to stop the bleeding for hours. Worse, it was just a slow leaking, and there was no real way to collect and save it.

Pushing his hips forward until the bottom of his torso stuck over the edge of the table, Old Hank adjusted his mirror and trimmed his body hair around his genitals; they fell as gray coils onto the gray and black residue. Finally, he took his shavings that he had caught in the sink the prior evening and dried overnight, and shook them onto the small pile. This too went into its own Tupperware, which sealed tightly and was so much more effective for saving, well, things like these.

Old Hank always had been quite regular, so he was able to grab two of the appropriate jars and add to those collections in the bathroom next door; for these he used smoked glass jars with tight screw caps and rubber gaskets, because he had heard that released gasses sometime could build up explosive pressure and cause unfortunate problems. With two room full of the stuff, he didn’t want any surprises.

Although Old Hank couldn’t hear very well anymore, the result of too many deep probes into his ears for his wax jars, he was distracted by a shrill call below. Looking out the window, he saw a small fox caught by the leg in the trap he had set for the raccoon that had been at his trash. “Serves him right,” thought Old Hank, who nonetheless descended the stairs as quickly as he was able. Grabbing a squirrel gun from the cabinet and two shells, slowly Old Hank lumbered through the hall and kitchen and out the back door. But by the time he got off the porch and around the corner the fox was gone, its gnawed leg already collecting flies in the growing heat of the day as it lay bloodied in the jaws of the trap.

Old Hank cleaned out the trap and reset it, throwing the leg towards the woods. He was half-way up the stairs when he paused, absorbed in some inexpressible revelation, and then he hustled down the steps and thrashed through the tall grass and underbrush until he found the fox leg. He held it by its paw with some distaste, but he carried it into the kitchen and placed in on the table, turning it around with one finger and examining the smooth fur, and the ripped flesh where the animal had gnawed and pulled until he was free.

Looking under the sink, Old Hank found a coffee can with its plastic lid holding a supply of used soap pads. Impatiently he shook out the contents, and carried the can over to the table and dropped the leg into it. He covered and uncovered it several times, each time peering over the rim and shaking the can a little. It was good, this leg; it was interesting too. But there was something wrong, something not wholly pleasing. Old Hank was not used to observing solitary things, and the truth of it was that fox leg, rattling around in there, just looked kind of lonely.

Old Hank took the can and replaced its cover, and took a roll of paper towels, and two or three of the thicker kitchen knives, and went upstairs to the bathroom. He pushed aside a few brown glass jars with disinterest and, dropping his robe off his body, began to turn in front of the mirror, figuring out what parts really weren’t all that important.

The other evening, at a small dinner, one of the guests said: “This morning I was texting with a woman from Brazil.” I cannot remember any context for the remark, which was delivered as if from a vacuum as far as I can recall, so much so that everyone stopped talking, held their forks in abeyance, and metaphorically raised their eyebrows.

Struck by the anomalous nature of this remark, and the subsequent unwillingness of the speaker to provide further detail (leaving unfinished what promised to be an interesting story), perhaps as the speaker was annoyed by the tone of the reception her opening sentence received, I asked each person to write and to circulate to all a short story starting with the line “This morning I was texting with a woman from Brazil.”

Now that many days have passed without receiving a single reply, even though my challenge at the time evinced general laughter which I took to be assent, I felt compelled to ask the speaker if she was now willing, in a more amenable atmosphere, to tell me the story that she had started. Politely, she demurred, the moment had passed she said, it would be uninteresting and furthermore perhaps on reflection embarrassing; she hung up the phone as quickly as politeness allowed.

I had occasion shortly thereafter to stop by the speaker’s house to drop off some books and saw, on the narrow table in her front hall, atop the day’s newspaper and under a small pile of keys and a few dollar bills, her cell phone. With no intention of permanent theft, I scooped the phone into my jacket pocket, and upon driving around the corner I pulled over and found out that I lacked the password to enter the device and scan the memory. No matter what I tried, no success: her address, her nick-name, the names of her husband and daughter and dog, a variant on her phone number. Later that night I gently dropped the phone into the mail box slot on the post at the end of her driveway.

A few days later I called the counsel general of Brazil and inquired as to whether he had a count or estimation of the number of Brazilian women living in greater Boston. At first the counsel, a well-known business lawyer in a white-shoe Federal Street law firm, thought my call was some type of prank, but I convinced him of the seriousness, if not the logic, of my inquiry. He then pointed out that it was absolutely impossible to know the answer and, in any event, even if there were an official record, undoubtedly there would be no accounting for what he smugly assured me were almost uncountable illegal immigrants who busied themselves by cleaning the offices and laboratories throughout the region.

I hung up feeling crestfallen, and the thought that the Brazilian woman in question might not even be in Boston at all, nor in New England, nor even the United States, was no comfort. I imagined her a bond trader in Singapore, a prostitute in Amsterdam, even one of 88 million women in Brazil itself.

Searching the speaker on-line yielded no insight. I perused Facebook, Linked-In, the surprisingly robust 13,000 items which Google produced against my entry of her name (including many for an artist in Taos with whom she shared her name exactly). No clues about any connection with Brazil or a woman from Brazil, not even in the older items relating to the speaker’s decade-old and now abandoned career as a real estate broker. Her history just lay there in perpetual plain view, but without any entries that might help me.

I could not write a short story, as I had challenged the group to do. It would only be an invented story, after all, untrue to the real-life story which the speaker still withheld, a falsehood which might crowd out the reality to ill effect, squashing forever the import of the true story that was sitting just out of reach, crying to be revealed.

There was a young woman from Brazil
Who was seeking an ultimate thrill.
She went back to Rio
And partied con brio.
That woman is partying still.

I could muster doggerel, it seemed, but it did not satisfy my needs.

Under moonlight dripping with Portuguese lilt
My mind went astray as do all who seek.
Atlantic waters lapping my shores
Gurgled the words “Brazilia Brazil….”

Serious poetry could not fill my needs either, and my effort reminded me that I was a failure as a writer, even when attempting mere sardonic imitation.

I finally capitulated. I invited myself to the speaker’s house, claiming some topic I needed to discuss in person, nothing earth-shattering mind you but best dealt with in person, and could her husband, now returned from extensive business travel, perhaps be present? No sense causing any platform to support unintended ripples….

They are friends, they accommodated my request with good humor and no sense of the sinister. We exchanged pleasantries, and opened and sipped the excellent bottle of Amarone I had brought as a peace offering and hoped-for lubricant for discourse. I then confessed my purpose, admitting in false self-deprecation that this quest struck even me as somewhat absurd. But would not the speaker now complete the story that she had started at dinner that night, the one that began “this morning I was texting a woman in Brazil”?

The pause after my request at some point became a tangible silence which I at first attributed to their being stunned by the ridiculousness of my inquiry. I almost expected laughter to break out, or an invitation to leave and take the remaining half-bottle of wine with me as they were both tired from their days and thank you very much for dropping by.

But then I noticed that the husband was glowering at the speaker, whose eyes were downcast, refusing contact with either her husband or with myself. And after this uncomfortable interlude, the husband said softly, “I did not know that you were still in touch….”

The speaker then looked up, ignoring me, and said with a hint of iron in her tone and more than a glint of defiance in her eyes, “I saw no reason to tell you, actually. After all, what were you going to do about it, one way or another?”

The silence resumed and could not have lasted as long as it feels in memory, with each of looking silently at one or another piece of furniture.

“You had best leave, Steve— if you don’t mind.” The husband had arisen, and had extended his hand to me.
.
“Yes, yes, of course,” I replied, placing my glass on the side table and standing up, no doubt too abruptly. I did not have anything to say. I awkwardly gave his hand one cursory pump, to which neither of us exerted any pressure, as if robust physical contact would somehow acknowledge a meeting which was unpleasant but not easily erased. I walked to the hall and put my hand on the door knob, looked back into the room, and saw them sitting silently, looking away from each other.

I opened the door gently, stepped delicately out on the stair landing, and glanced back one last time.

“I’m sorry,” I said over my shoulder– perhaps too quietly to be heard? Easing the door shut, I walked out into the night.

[Written for my son Matthew who was having trouble writing stories in the fourth grade]

It showed up by pulse beam first, we had no visual. It came in and out. Lateral adjustment made no difference, but elevation from nominal horizon brought stronger signals. We slowed, and armed the lasers just in case; all we had found was space junk, no one had EVER found anything other than natural objects, but protocol is protocol. I had told them if ever we did find a biologic, our form of weaponry likely would not be functional, but no one listens to astronauts; our human presence on spacecraft is an after-thought anyway, computers and robotics do all the work and send the data back to Earth without our doing anything.

Visuals are difficult in the void, of course; we rely on the electronics for location, size, distance, composition. This thing was acting differently, however; computer said it was wafer-thin and regular in shape, consistent with manufacture – but that was so unlikely here, year 90 out of Earth, year 3 after our defrost.

We retro-fired to dead slow, coming up at a thousand klicks an hour, then powered down to drift. The forward TV finally gave us a visual from about 400 meters, a dark and and barely reflective edge, metallic it looked, and only a couple of hundred centimeters thick. A regular slab like this was unknown in the natural world, at least per our data banks (although those banks were last updated a few years ago).

We sent transmission to Earth immediately; as with all our data; it would take years to arrive but we had to report per protocol about anything “non-natural.” Data sets here were scanty, we had no read on size, composition or propulsion — or weaponry or indigenous organisms.

We spent about 18 hours slowly circling the edge: we observed constant thickness, no readable data on composition beyond notable reflectivity, no observable surface articulation across the surface plane. A rectangular slab of unknown metal, floating in space far from any star system.

Louis wanted to land on it; navigational aspects were stable, we could touch down at near-hover so if there was no ability to bear weight, an unlikely event if we were careful about it in zero Gs, we could disengage. Louis thought it was safe, no radioactivity, no chemical or electronic emissions. As flight commander I was not so sure; perhaps it had negative attributes we could not measure – or even understand. Absence of readable data might make the slab MORE, not less dangerous. I ordered two robotic probes to be sent, one on each side of the surface.

Probe Alpha went first, headed to the plane towards nominal horizon which we had begun to designate, arbitrarily, “the top.” It moved a kilometer in from the edge, hovered at various altitudes, and got no readings. We had computer put it down at zero force to keep the slab from picking up spin from the power of the rockets or the mass of the probe. On the surface, chemical, electronic and atomic emissions continued to read zero. A mechanical arm tried to drill the surface, which did not yield even to the diamond tip of the device. The slab could not be tested.

Probe Beta put down on “the bottom,” obverse side, another kilometer inwards from the edge. Same results. Louis was go for EVA, and I was out of ideas so I agreed. Matthew had no choice; he and Louis suited up.

Placing people on the surface could not be achieved without imparting some force or weight to the slab, however nominal we attempted to make it. Would the platform spin away, or was it somehow stabilized in space, by unseen forces or mechanisms? If one of my guys walked on it, however gently, would the entire platform begin to twist and spin in space, perhaps throwing my crew off and into the void? We tethered the men to the spacecraft, just to be safe, and the guys jetted over to the slab and delicately descended in an effort to minimize the Gs on impact. Contact force was nominal, and the slab held steady. Computer could not tell if stability was based on the ratio of landing force to the mass of the platform, or whether some mechanism—or organism – had counter-acted the impact torque.

There was nothing to report about our first walk on the platform. No tests showed any data. Seemingly no amount of force could destabilize it and make it spin; finally the crew jumped up and down (as best as one can jump in space) and there was no effect on stability. The guys could not drill or flake off any of the surface; no molecular data could be gathered, the laser had no effect. No gravity was evident. Stroboscopic lighting revealed no visible markings, codes, writings, seams, apertures. The team hit the two hour limit and had to return. “Like walking on the sidewalk,” said Louis. Matthew nodded in agreement; Matthew was not much for talking.

We fed the little data we had into the computer: length, width, thickness, reflectivity and stability. The aggregate data did not compute; it seemed that the aggregate of the data described something that could not exist. We took our sleep cycles and regrouped at 3649/0145 nominal.

“No clue.” Louis was shaking his head again. “Maybe we should explore every centimeter on both sides,” Matthew suggested. “This is clearly not a natural structure and this may be the first contact of our species, of humans, with another civilization. This may be IT, guys. This may be the most exciting thing that ever has happened to human beings. Some day people will remember today, November 18, 2147, as the most important moment in all human history!”

I was prepping my suit; the exhaust fans kicked in to recycle my sweat. I had to take my own look at the surface, although protocol said that the commander never went EVA.

“Got an idea,” said Matthew. We turned to him. In the years since the defrost, he had spoken maybe only five times total, and we had come to accept, if not understand, his weird silence. When he did speak, he got our total attention.

“The only number that the computer recognizes from the little data we have is the shape of the slab. I ran a search of the length and width of the slab through computer, and the only match is with the Greek letter Pi. The ratio of the slab’s length to its width is equal to Pi. Pi is the ratio of the radius of a circle to its circumference, area, everything. It would be the same in every civilization, every world. Now maybe it is just a coincidence, but computer finds that the ratio is equal to Pi to –get this—ten thousand decimal places; that would be one hell of a coincidence. It really cannot be an accident. Has to be a message, a sign.”

Louis and I stared at Matthew as he continued. “If one civilization wanted to communicate with another, and doesn’t know the spoken or written language of course, how does it do it? Mathematics is universal; they would use math, and any visitor like us, who got this far, would understand the meaning, would recognize it was a signal. Sure, they could use atomic data or wave data but the one thing EVERY civilization is going to know is the ratios of measuring a circle. The first and simplest thing a discoverer of this thing would do is to measure it. That is the first thing WE did, right? They got the message to us in the simplest way: an organism manufactured this thing and left it here for us to find.”

“Ten thousand places? It’s correct to 10,000 places?” I whispered the words.

Matthew nodded and starting putting on his suit. “I gotta get back to the surface, Skipper, I gotta try something. I gotta EVA now.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Not gonna say,” said Matthew. “It is too crazy to even tell you. But you’ll see. Stay here, Skipper; let Louis and me give this a try.”

* * * * * * * * *

On the TV, I saw Louis and Matthew floating gently, slowly across the surface of the slab. They were about a klick off the edge, their lights trained on the surface, searching for a landing place with who-knows-what characteristics, one spot was the same as any other. Rhythmic breathing filled my headphones, but neither of them were speaking. Finally they gently touched down on the surface.

Then, Matthew’s voice cracked over, musing and low but somehow mechanical. “Circle,” he said, “circle. What to do about a circle. There are no circles printed on the slab so how do we input data to the slab? How?” Then he began to scream at the top of his voice: “Circle. Circle. Circle.” Nothing. “Of course not, course not,” he mumbled, angry at his own stupidity. “How the heck would they know the word for a circle in our language….”

He then began to wave his arms in great circular arcs. Nothing happened. He turned around in place. Nothing. He walked slowly around in a circle about five meters across, going around Louis who just stood there, amused at the process.

“Dammit, nothing happened,” said Matthew.

That was the last we ever saw or heard of him.

A light flashed from somewhere and his space suit and helmet and gear collapsed onto the metal surface, empty of Matthew, empty of everything, and he was gone.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Matthew walked into his fourth grade classroom on November 18, 2012. He had to go to the bathroom. His head hurt and he was a little dizzy. He had to urinate. He was shaking a bit. Maybe he should go see Nurse Cornelia, but his parents had warned him to stop his almost daily visits to the school’s infirmary room.

Ms. Comando eyed Matthew with concern; he was prone to lapses of attention, and to lengthy visits to the boy’s room, but this time he looked a little pale and, well, spaced out.

“Are you sure you are okay, Matthew?,” she asked.

“I – I think so. I just need to go to the bathroom. Maybe a glass of water. I’m pretty dry.” Matthew looked downward, then up towards his teacher. “I mainly want a pencil and some paper. I want to write down this weird dream I think I had just now, as I was walking up the stairs….”

Here I am, imagining that I am in Missoula which I think is in Montana. I have never been in, nor seen a picture of, this town, and am not even sure it exists or is in Montana, but I like to imagine I am there all the same as I like the sound of the name.

I am reading the New York Times Sunday Magazine. It is not what you are thinking. I am not reading it in protest against the arid existence I lead in Missoula, because I can imagine whatever I want to imagine, and I am imagining that I do not find Missoula to be arid at all. I find it peaceful.

We in Missoula seem wholly out of touch. People in the Times are enormously wealthy, or anticipate being so. Numerous trust companies want to manage their money. All these women are Nordic blonde with neat crows feet; husbands are politely grey and neatly trimmed.

They all seem to live in tall buildings in busy exciting cities, paying millions for condominiums smaller than the barn I have just imagined I have here on my ranch in Missoula. They allow their living rooms to be photographed but someone has come in and thrown away everything personal, and all the books and newspapers. Perhaps they do not even read, not even the Sunday Times.

Perhaps they do not read because they lost their eyes to cancer. Celebrity urban cancer stars, they are courted to recover in hospitals and treatment centers all around North American. Runaway cells have no chance, these people all will be saved, and it does not say so but I am sure, I will imagine, that if they have any chemical or radioactive treatments these people will not vomit.

No one of them drives a truck. All drive cars of quiet elegance. They have wanted cars like this all their lives I am sure I imagine. They have counted the hours until they could own one, counted them on a time piece that is not only not a watch but also is something they cannot own but only care for on behalf of the next generation that, I infer or imagine, similarly will find that ownership eludes them. Next generation will tell time only on their electronic personal devices and perhaps then the failure to be able to ever own a time piece will not seem so anomalous or harsh.

They are an unanchored crew, there is a column telling them what is ethical and what is not. They write letters to authors using perfect grammar and terse phrases. They have never imagined Missoula and, if they have, they have not imagined my Missoula, or the real one. They are locked beneath the surface glaze of the hard white paper that carries their inked DNA. Even now, they are headed for the roof top pool in the heart of the city.

I will imagine the fire flies are circling my barn in my Missoula, and excuse me if I must turn to the end of the New York Times Sunday Magazine and imagine that I can know both the characters in German operas and the county in which Missoula Montana resides so that I can complete the crossword puzzle in ink. I take a wild stab at the occupant of Grant’s tomb, it has five letters and appears to begin with a “G”.

Although it is difficult to remember exactly when it began, there are clues in certain memories: wet peso bills spread to dry on the table, a hacking cough from the chill, the sting of rainwater running through my eyes. Gunther was to blame for all of it — at least at the beginning. After a while, I guess candor requires me to accept personally some responsibility.

It was one of those moisture-infused days in the tropics that gives definition to the concept of humidity. It was not just that the rain came; it rains almost everywhere in the world, and in one way or another all rain is the same. The totality of water was the defining emotion; the heated air itself carried a heavy burden of wetness, and the horizon blurred in thinning mists. Walls of the hotel, whitewashed against the sun, toned grey to echo the sky, and the palm fronds dulled toward blackness as they waved in the gusts.

The weather had been threatening for two days, and the tourists lolled in the wet heat, buying Mexican handicrafts and waiting for a beach day. The front desk assured me that the rains never stayed very long in Cancun, but the lush jungle visible from the balcony gave lie to his words. Although just being away from the city at first was vacation enough, by the time the drizzle settled into a constant pattern that third straight morning I had accumulated enough unspent energy to be tempted by misadventure.

Gunther was well over six feet, and in much better shape than my office-flabbed body. When we met at the bar, he lifted a lean gin and tonic to click against my foamy fruit concoction, and the pineapple slice and umbrella jostled against each other in my glass. His clothes were of the lean variety also: simple white pullover, khaki shorts, white tennis shoes and no socks. My Hawaiian shirt hung as an embarrassing flag over my paunch, draping down towards my orange shorts. I was a caricature of myself, and myself was none too pleasant a reality. We had shared two uncomfortable drinks at lunch and quickly parted; he babbled on about diving and fishing for tuna, and I confessed that my souvenir shopping was not quite complete.

I had just settled down to my book on the balcony, feet up on the other chair, dangling just out of the rain’s reach, when Gunther called on the house phone and invited me to golf. My protests seemed irrelevant; if you have never played you had to start sometime, if it was drizzling there was no wait for tee times, if you lacked clubs they could be rented. Thirty minutes later I was in a taxi, speeding down the causeway, palm trees waving at me through the wipers. Gunther continued his elated patter: the rain would refresh us, he was pleased to be my teacher, he just appreciated the company, the greens would be very slow because of the showers.

It was mid-afternoon when we stepped from the taxi, and as I trotted into the clubhouse my backwards glance caught Gunther strolling slowly after me, drops of water already beaded on his visor. No there was no delay, yes we could tee off, yes I could rent shoes and clubs. A mere eighty-seven dollars later found me standing on a grassy rise, club in hand, ocean wind carrying the drizzle around my glasses and into the corners of my eyes. Rain coated my lenses, and before the very first ball was hit it became clear that my handkerchief was inadequate to the job of absorption. Rain ran unobstructed down my forehead, tickling my nose before it plopped off my face and onto my shirt. The wind pasted my clothing flush to my body, and the first shivers introduced themselves to me notwithstanding that by then I should have been par-boiled. My body vainly pumped some heat up to my chest; I coughed once, then pretended I had just cleared my throat.

Gunther hit first, and when I lost sight of the white arc and turned to him for guidance his face was pointed down the fairway, his weight forward on the balls of his feet, blue eyes tracking his ball as it landed six or eight feet from the flag. He smiled as he described the splash of impact: wetter than he had thought, but no problem.

Having hit his ball, Gunther turned to me. Oblivious to what had become a driven, near-soaking downpour, he patiently positioned my hands on the club he selected, and guided my arms and head through the seemingly simple steps of hitting the ball. He ignored the rain, making me too embarrassed to take notice of it myself. We pretended in our own ways that the sun was shining, that soaking day, that day when it never stopped drenching us, that day when after ten minutes you could see the outline of my underwear through the plastered sheet of my clothing as they hugged my frame in bulging outlines and flabby crannies, and we trudged up and down the hills and around and over water and sand pits, all the while he matching par on that deserted golf course as if he were playing some national tournament on some sun-saturated afternoon.

His patience was astounding; I dug deep furrows in the tightly growing grass, the metal edges of my clubs cutting into the saturated sod; I hit over and around the greens, used infinite putts and strokes and hits or whatever they were called as my ball rolled around the holes, each elusive hole, each exasperating infernal hole, each unattainable tiny wet secret hole, each damnable damned and Goddamned hole; and each hole became transmuted, from something I cared not a whit about into some essential quest, some desire tempered though my anger, forged through my burning of eyes and shivers of flesh, transcendent beyond all real worth, a sheer physical dedication to the exclusion of all other reality. By the eighth hole the rain had stopped in my mind, my bitter burning maniacal mind, the water no longer reached my skin, the wind slithered around me as I stood hacking on the top of each grassed ritual alter of a hill, cursing my balls as they skittered left and right, rolled down wide expanses of lawn in faint imitation of Gunther’s majestic arching strokes.

I cursed and sweated through the heat-soaked all-encompassing moisture of the afternoon. I injected my own moisture into the great flow of wet air, added my contribution to the Gulf Stream of hot wetness being brewed that afternoon over the Yucatan, a steamy froth to be pumped Northward on the boiling oceans to bathe those thousand palm-treed islands that depended on that wet blast, yes I was part of the heat and energy and struggle and wetness that became the Gulf Stream, an energy so large that it would not die except five thousand miles Northward in a cold and ice-strewn sea; and each ball I hit and hacked and beat and cursed and yes kicked and coaxed was all part of the design, all necessary to this broader task, and it was wonderful that Gunther had known, had always known that fact and had been willing, in his own controlling eager way, to share it with me.

Six o’clock found me naked in my room, my clothing collapsed in a leaking pile on top of my sneakers, merging their precious moisture with the rug, unchecked by me, fastidious me. God I was a mess, water dripping from my hair onto my peso bills I had pulled from my pocket and spread to dry on the small night table.

I stared at the chunks of me, the blobs of me, in the mirror, the meaty hunks of wet flesh, bright red through abrasion and wind and water, patches of roughness and worse shivering under the air conditioning that I could not control; my eyes still burned when I blinked, a shallow pain that verified my suffering. Outside, the Gulf Stream was still being born in a twirl of wind and water; inside I held the yellow golf ball, shivering in front of my mirror, and smiled.

* * * * * * * * *

Lately, for some reason, my game has been off, even the guys at the club have noticed. While I still carry my six handicap, and last weekend led my partner and me to another low net score and yet another small brass-plaque trophy, there is an unmistakable loss of crispness. My tee shots are too fat, they do not carry; my chips don’t bite the green but roll out of control across the grass; my putts hang on the lip and defy me.

Billy, the club pro who taught me a dozen years ago and has been gratified by my progress, can’t understand it; he has suggested that I may be just a little stale. I do play five or six times a week, with thirty-six holes each Saturday and Sunday. Since my divorce – Helen complained of being widowed by golf and there was much truth to what she said – I had taken only two or three vacation days, to coincide with nearby golf clinics, and the pressure of the office was intense of course, having to fit all my work into a four a.m. to noon workday, no breaks. The lack of promotion has long ceased to bother me, and the office and I have reached an easy truce; I pay it Caesar’s due and it respects the balance of my life.

Today I was out at the thirteenth hole, which happens to be the furthest from the club house, working on my short irons. The thirteenth is ideal for this drill, an attractive and slightly elevated hole closely protected on the left by bunkers and on the right and behind by various water hazards. It was a chilly early December afternoon, no one else was out on the course, and I hit baskets of balls for longer than I realized I guess because I found myself straining to see the balls as they bit into the putting green a few dozen yards away. I was annoyed, no doubt about it, but I continued to hit; I felt my groove coming back, and the yellow-ness of the balls still could be picked up against the sky before they arced downward.

In fact, the later it got the better I hit.

I hit faster and faster, hit through the third bucket of balls, went up to the green and collected another buckets-worth under the dim moonlight, went back down and hit those balls also. Each stroke felt better, surer, truer. I never had realized that before, how when you practice you are looking for your groove, and just when you may find it, just when the flow of your body becomes the idea of the motion you seek, then something happens and you have to stop. It’s lunch, or tee time, or you’re out of balls, or some other really quite uninteresting reason, and all of sudden, in defiance of logic, you have to stop.

And once you stopped because, perhaps, it was getting dark, then all that extra time afterwards, that just always goes to waste. Or at least, it used to.

* * * * * * * * * *

It has been about seven months since I started to practice each night. At first there were the typical difficulties; the club was not sure they were happy with the arrangement, what with insurance problems and all, and the office had to come to terms with the new schedule.

If I don’t get off the course until, say one a.m., it is not reasonable to expect to do your best at the office if you start in only three hours. But the new half-time schedule from eight to noon is working fine; you know how part-time work is, you get so much more productivity from your grateful workers and the employer makes out like a bandit. Although my new apartment is small – who can afford a house on half-pay? – it is positioned just between the club and downtown, so I no longer waste a lot of time commuting. And if it’s been a really tough night of practice, I can always save a few minutes by going directly to the office and sleeping at the foot of my desk, although I have to be sure to awaken a few minutes before eight because the girls really seem to be upset if they come in and find me stretched out under my blanket.

Interestingly, a few months ago, I found myself thinking of Gunther again after all those years. One night I was out on fifteen, working on my sand wedge, and it began to rain, rain really hard. Not the warm tropical variety, more a Northeastern wind-blown shiver-your-timbers variety storm. In a minute, my windbreaker clung to my chest, and I could barely see my phosphorescent golf balls as I pitched them up towards the green. The beam of light from my miner’s helmet illuminated a tunnel of flowing drops of water, but could not penetrate as far as the flat atop the green. I shook my night goggles every thirty seconds, but visibility was hopeless.

I took them off, and then took off my regular glasses also. The wind was cold, my cheeks ruddy on the verge of rawness. If it didn’t know better, I would have thought that a drop or two was frozen into sleet, or perhaps even hail. Early Decembers in Boston can be chilly and mean-spirited.

Without glasses and goggles, I was more comfortable, and I found that if I shut my eyes the stinging went away. My swing, on which I could then concentrate, immediately became more fluid. The balls wocked and splotched off my club, although I had to suffer no small number of mis-hits, what with the darkness, the rain, and my eyes being shut most of the time. In fact, it seemed not to make any sense to place the balls on the grass anyway; I was losing a lot of them and besides, it was the flow of the swing I was working on.

This approach showed much promise; golf balls were very expensive for my half-time salary, not to mention the cost and time painting on the phosphorescent paint.

The truth of the matter, I won’t deny it, is that I spent the better part of ten hours out on that golf course that evening, just swinging my clubs. As my arms got tired I alternated woods and irons to feel the different weights, and every half-hour I’d putt for a few minutes until my circulation improved.

Well, I guess that was around the time that I started missing work altogether, even on my new schedule, I won’t deny it. It wasn’t really unfair when they laid me off. I had my thirty years, so my pension was fully vested, and my medical benefits were continued which proved to be a good thing; all that swinging out on the course late at night through that winter caused no small number of chills, and twice I had to deal with a slight touch of pneumonia. Nothing serious.

* * * * * * * * *

I have no family, and after a few months the few people who remembered me from the old days in the office lost interest and stopped visiting. I cannot say that I hold them to task for it; I always stayed to myself, particularly after I learned that none of them golfed very well. I guess it’s a case of “live by the club, die by the club.”

Helen never came, although I particularly asked that she be contacted. Too many years and too few good memories I guess, although I like to believe that I would have visited her under similar circumstances.

My bursitis doesn’t allow me to swing a club any more, and my legs don’t work well enough to carry me up and down even the shortest of courses, but I don’t mind. About twenty years ago, when I gave up hitting the balls and just concentrated on my swings, I began the slow liberation of my game from tiresome convention. The task was finished a few years after that, when I found that I didn’t really have to swing the clubs themselves, I could just close my eyes and sense the flow and rhythm of my swing, trace the straight arms and snapping wrists, sveltly imagine my hips and shoulders moving through the stroke and conveying my power and life force into the ball, dream that ball skyward and then downward, a neat and self-satisfying downward swoop.

Although originally I found one drawback to this ultimate form of my game — even my oldest golf partners and friends seemed agitated to hear about my rounds, my difficult approach shots and clever club selections — the advantages were so overpowering that I long ago ceased caring, and marked off their agitation to nothing more than a good deal of sour grapes. After all, I no longer needed to buy golf balls, or even clubs; I could surrender my club membership and, in fact, the savings on dues came in handy because all that golfing had been keeping me broke what with my small pension and only a single earner’s social security.

And, best yet, finally I discovered how to take my world-wide life-long golf tour and vacation, and that was one happy day I tell you. It happened that I was walking past my local library when the idea hit me. Rushing inside, I signed up for a card and asked for directions to the golfing section. Although shocked to see that it only occupied half a shelf, and was designated part of some other category entirely, leisure or sports or some such, I was able to find just what I needed anyhow: several large picture books of the great golf courses of the world, complete with photos, schematic layouts of the holes, distances in yards and meters, and narrative describing the unique problems of each hole on each course.

That first afternoon, seated unobtrusively in a simple wooden chair at a library table, I chose the legendary main course at Saint Andrews in Scotland, the holy birthplace of all of golf. I studied the layout, absorbed the view from the tee, closed my eyes, grabbed my two wood, and stood tall in the Scottish breeze as I drove straight down the fairway. A smile spread across my face as I chipped up to the green, and that smile became a peal of laughter as I sank a thirty-five foot putt to birdie the hole.

The librarian jolted me with her touch; it seems that I had talked through the hole, consulting with my caddy about the crosswind. I checked the books out and took them home; no need to disturb the library routine.

I have played all the great courses these last few years, all the great courses of the world. The rugged European courses are hardest, the California sweeps of sensuous green the most lugubrious, but I must confess a partiality to the courses of Mexico. When I close my eyes I can feel the moist heaviness of their air; I remember to adjust my club and stroke to compensate. When I putt I must make provision for the dense tight grasses nurtured in the intense rainfalls. The wind from offshore pushes my tee-shots, and I turn my body precisely enough to counterbalance the force.

Today the nurse has propped up my favorite, an old but verdant friend of mine in Cancun, near the top of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. I recall that once, long ago, I have played this course. Oh, not in my mind. I mean by standing on the ground and whaling and hitting and actually playing the game in physical life.

It is an odd feeling, this memory, and it merges with a face, the face of a man taller and trimmer than I am, old but not stooped and not bedridden like me. His voice is flat in that mid-Western near-twang that tells you that patience is virtue, and his eyes are startlingly clear and blue. We are standing on the first tee, and I think it is beginning to rain. I do not mind.

As I swing through my first ball, I remember. A smile fills my face as I rest it against my pillow, and I turn to speak to Gunther, to thank him.

But he is gone.

“Be careful when you walk alone under a moonlit sky blanketed with stars…. The winds of the Orient may blow over you, making you feel as though you are blooming like a tree under the rain. She will be there: Xtabay, waiting for you, sure to attract you with her perfume and envelope you in the elixir of her aroma. She is like the flower that blooms at dawn, damp from the night’s weeping. And she, Xtabay, is much more than that.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

I had stayed behind at the pool, grateful for the break from routine. We had been in the Caribbean for almost two weeks, and although four couples create enough interpersonal variety to make the time pass, it turned out that two weeks of constant conviviality was too much to expect.

The men had left for the golf course again, their false camaraderie unabated by the wet heat. The women had headed to town, shopping for onyx and silver trinkets. The pool sustained me, its blue-green-ness surrounding my limbs, pushing my pelvis up to the sun. The weight of the rays drove into and through me, enough to burn, not enough to sink me. By midafternoon, I again began to believe that I could tolerate a few more days of togetherness.

I was so enervated that, later, I joined the women in a cab to the golf club for the by-now-obligatory margarita and taco party on the patio overlooking the last hole. By the time we arrived, the three golfers were into their second or third beers; protocol required no margaritas until the group had fully assembled. While stories of the day’s hunt were told in raucous interjection, Paco moved among us with the large pale drinks, glasses rimmed in salt and sloshing in icy milkiness. Jorge delivered tacos midst gracias and mucho gracias; vacationers permitting waiters to enter into the passing intimacy of our tribe.

While generally more interested in the stories the women brought back from town, it was assumed that I would rather rehash the day of golfing. The tribal assumptions were strong, not worth resisting.

“And then after I teed off on three, this woman came out of the trees with a flower in her hair.”

All side-eddies of conversation gelled around Ernst’s remark. I feared that this interesting tid-bit would be swallowed in the meaningless flow of chatter, so I jumped on it.

“What do you mean, a woman? What did she look like? Old, young, did she speak English? Where did she come from? Did the caddy know her?”

Ernst turned to my wife with loud confidentiality. “I don’t know where she came from, but she headed right for your father, I’ll tell you that.”

I had been talked into a vacation with by in-laws in a moment of winter chill when the promise of a subsidized beach sojourn overpowered my judgment. What was that saying about repenting in leisure?

Dieter, my father-in-law, was a tall man, the kind of person who had presence. Not handsome, not thin, not muscular, rather his entire aspect was large and pleasant and open. The mystery woman might well have drifted into his orbit, as did so many new acquaintances.

“Yep,” my father-in-law confessed after a quick sip and a salt-induced wince. “She walked right up to me on the tee. She must have been thirty-five or forty, very tan, with this big red flower in her hair. Long black hair….”

“Well, was she pretty, or attractive or what?”

My question must have seemed too eager, or lacked the right touch, I do not know. Sometimes when I want to know something I lose control of the social niceties. My wife gave me a look, but the golfers missed it; they grew into the implicit bonding of the story, pleased I had expressed an interest.

“Well, she sort of looked like a left-over from the sixties, some flower child or something.” Larry was my brother-in-law, and putting the fine detail on things was not one of his attributes.

“Was she pretty or just dressed in golf clothes or what,” I pressed. The eyes at the table were beginning to wander, and two of the women, clearly less enthralled than I over this oddity, had broken off into a side conversation.

Dieter twisted his glass, testing to see if there was anything hiding among the ice cubes or whether it was time to order a refill. “She was actually sort of worn out, lots of lines. She was white—sort of, not real Mexican or anything, but sort of dark also; she looked like the sun had done a job on her. The hair was jet black, though. Couldn’t get rid of her. Wanted to ride in one of the carts, can you believe that?” He twisted around, on the hunt for a waiter.

“Did she want money? What did she say to you?” With that, my wife shot me a chilly glance, one that said “why are you so interested in this story, just what the hell are you doing?,” one that said “that’s your last question, you’re coming across weird here,” one that said, “my family doesn’t understand how obsessed you can get so just drop it.” Her eyes said all these things and more, and also suggested a price tag I wouldn’t want to pay if I persisted.

“No,” Ernst said, “she didn’t even speak English, only Spanish. The caddy, he was only a kid, he looked kind of nervous but said he was sure he had never seen her before.” Ernst knocked off his drink and said his last in a conversation-ending tone: “We just finally waved her off, sent her away. I went to get my driver and turned back and, well, she just was gone and that was that.”

And then we talked about tequila and salsa, sun tans and sunburns. We admired earrings, discussed chip shots and bogeys. We debated dinner as if it were the national debt, and whether the local taxi drivers were to be trusted. We discussed everything except what I wanted to know about, and then we climbed in our taxis and went back to the hotel and dressed for dinner.

The next day we had rented a mini-van to drive our tribe out to a distant beach for a day of snorkeling. I had drunk enough the prior evening to make credible my claimed stomach ache, and after small fussings everyone went off without me. At least Laura did not offer to stay behind and take care of her husband.

I waited a half-hour, then dressed and cabbed over to the golf club. I had always intended to learn some Spanish before the trip. I consider it rude to go to another’s country and expect the people to speak your foreign tongue, regardless of the circumstances. But it had been a few weeks from hell in the office, not even clear until the last minute that I even would be able to break free and take the trip. By the time I was able to open the Berlitz I was seated on the airplane, and my exhaustion allowed me only to scan the first pronunciation page before I fell asleep. And at the hotel and the shops and restaurants English had been no problem, and thus no incentive to learn even the Spanish rudiments. This made my next task much harder.

When I reached the club, the starter and the few caddies sitting under the straw canopy near the first hole either did not understand me or took some special pleasure in pretending to be confused. I could not blame them; if they came to my office in Boston and started asking curious questions in a strange foreign voice, I surely would have them summarily tossed out.

Wandering into the restaurant, I found only one lone waiter at this early hour. He was not familiar to me, not part of our false circle of family fun we had woven over the past several nights. “Is Paco around,” I asked. “Jorge?” I suggested. Shrugs, and an indecipherable spurt of Spanish staccato. I pointed to my watch, intending to ask for the time of their expected arrival, and shrugged myself; the waiter shrugged back.

Outside near the starter’s shack was a glass-covered map of the golf course— the first few holes lay in a near straight line running away from the club-house. The third tee looked like a good eight hundred yards away, half a mile perhaps. As I stood considering whether I could get away with just walking out onto the course and strolling up to the third tee, a familiar face reflected back at me from the glass.

“Hey, Jorge.” My enthused false tone echoed the drunken style of the tribe. I even gave him a soft, friendly slap on the shoulder. Could it be that he saw through me? Did I sense his body recoiling, if only an inch?

“Tito said you were looking for me, senor?” His voice was flat, not so much unfriendly as guarded.

“Yes, yes, actually I was.” We were standing in the sun in front of the clubhouse, and I didn’t want to have this conversation in so open a place. “Let’s go inside,” I invited, taking a few steps towards the door, and he fell in behind me. Speeding up, the suction of my momentum dragged him through the front door of the club in my wake.

I tried to order a margarita for each of us, but somehow it ended up that Jorge stood up, made me a drink and served it. This did not create the intimate environment I was trying to create. I asked him to sit with me at one of the low tables, making a sweeping sign with my arm, but still he held back, looking around perhaps for a supervisor or another patron, but it was still well before noon and we had the place to ourselves. Trapped, he sat, leaning forward in the soft chair lest anyone think that he was lounging like a guest.

“I want to talk to you about the woman on the golf course.”

After a moment he looked down, silently. During that moment, his eyes flared, quickly, instinctively.

“I am very interested in the woman who was on the third hole of the golf course yesterday.”

Nothing; I shifted to face him more frontally.

“I am very interested in the woman who was on the golf course. I am prepared to pay for this information.”

Still the same stare, same gentle shrug. Polite attention, no communication.

I leaned forward until Jorge was forced to blink; in for the proverbial penny, here comes the proverbial pound: “I am willing to pay much for this information.” Silence.

“Molto.” No, no wrong language. “Mucho. Mucho!”

Well, Jorge could stare, I’ll give you that. I stared my most intensely ingratiating but mildly intense stare, and he gave me back a big-brown-eyed-empty I-don’t-know-honest-senor-sir-por-favor kind of stare that told me he was a heck of a stare-er, and that I was on the wrong track.

“Well, do you think anyone in the kitchen might know about the woman on the golf course?” His eyes flicked towards the kitchen. “So there is someone in the kitchen who knows about the woman on the golf course?” Silence. Finally a shrug.

Then, flatly but politely: “Are we finished talking together, senor?” Well I thought, no actually we are not finished, I’m not finished, actually I am going to tie you to that fucking chair and beat you with self-righteous Yankee brutality until you bleed from the corners of your mouth and you cannot wait, just cannot wait to tell me anything and everything that I want to know about my lady of the golf course. Actually I want to hurt you badly for pretending not to understand me, I want to punish you for all the thoughts that I know in my heart you are thinking about me as we stare each other down, with you winning.

“Yes, sure we are done,” I said. “Thanks for your time,” I added, and immediately hated myself for adding that, dammit what a stupid habit that made me say that! Jorge, already arisen and turning, looked back over his shoulder and gave me a gentle smile.

I leave without paying for the drink, hoping he will follow me outside. No such luck Although I hate golf, and am suitably terrible to boot, I find myself renting clubs, shoes and a caddy. Yes, I am playing alone. No I do not wish to be paired with another golfer or group. Yes I understand there is an extra charge. No, it’s quite alright, I am one of those curious Americans, I guess, who prefers to play alone, thank you. After interminable trivia, I am free to tee off.

My caddy is twelve, or maybe fourteen. His name is Raymondo. His eyes are large, almond-shaped, deep brown, and leave no room on his face for any other noticeable features. I toy with the idea of walking directly to the third hole, explaining as I go that I have played the course before and that I prefer it that way, holes one and two are after all so damned boring. My guess is that this will create more trouble than it is worth. Better to play the first two holes.

This is something of a problem. My driving game, always weak and embarrassing, is at a new nadir. My tee shot off the first squirts ten yards to the left and nestles deep into the taller fringe grasses. When Raymondo appears seemingly to suggest that I replace it on my tee, I angrily wave away his offer. I also disdain his club selection, and attack the ball with my driver. Grass and earth fly in several directions. My ball squiggles out onto the fairway, no more than twenty yards away. Already four new golfers are mounting the tee area, and one or two are looking curiously at my position, which is improbable in the extreme given my tee time was six minutes ago.

I bend over and pick up my ball, and throw my club at Raymondo. He’s a kid, why bother to explain it to him anyway. Vamoose. Next hole.

The second hole is shorter and straighter. If this expedition is not to be a travesty, I must concentrate. I position the ball, address it, stare at its back edge, remember to keep my arms straight and swing up and through. The ball arcs slightly and Raymondo and I exhale in relief as it rolls cooperatively up the fairway. I am now desperate to be done with it, successfully done with it. I hit a wedge shot that actually lands where it is supposed to land. It rolls back towards the hole. In my real prior life, I never have hit such a shot. But now I really need it, need the shot, I am not playing for a score or for someone to say “hey, nice golf shot” – what the hell else are we playing, anyway? – I am playing for real, for keeps, for I don’t know what but I know it’s very very important.

Raymondo is looking at me with respect. Actually it is relief. I imagine he is thinking: perhaps this gringo will actually play a game of golf and pay me my twenty dollars and not go crazy on me, why do I always get the crazies, the starter has always had it in for me. I pull out the putter and without lining up the shot I sink a ten-footer. Raymondo smiles and reaches for the score card, but then he remembers the first hole and stops in confusion. I grab the card from his hand and stuff it into one of my shorts pockets. The score is not where my mind is focused. There is a sign in Spanish and English on which I have focused: “To the Third Tee.”

Raymondo leads the way, to show me. I am having none of it. I shoo him behind me. Glancing back, I do not see the next foursome. My quick clean escape from the second hole has bought me some time.

Through a small copse of trees, I come upon the third tee. It is about ten meters square, and elevated above the fairway which slopes away in front of me. It is ringed with trees, but the trees are not very thick. Quickly I scan around in an arc. I see no one, nothing unusual. To my distress, the trees are so thin that in most directions I see through them, to the sky beyond. No dense woods to wander or to hide.

Raymondo has taken a wooden driver from the bag and he has teed my ball. My back is to the hole, oblivious. I stare, and he waits. After a minute or so, he taps me respectfully on the sleeve, but I shrug off the gesture. The breeze is picking up, it is afternoon, there are now a few clouds on the horizon, the afternoon thunderstorms may arrive today. The winds stir the trees, but it is a tease, the shapes I see are different shapes. Minutes pass; Raymondo calls out “Senor?” I turn on him, and my face must scare him, for he drops the club and backs behind the golf bag.

I look behind me. That foursome is coming down the second fairway towards the green, I do not have much time. To relax Raymondo, I pick up the club, but again turn my back to the fairway. Slowly I walk a crescent around the tee, peering into the trees. They are now swaying in the breeze, and the breeze is becoming more insistent. Even the darkest patches now are spread against the sky by the growing gusts, but nowhere is there the woman, nowhere is my woman of the golf course. I am staring, I am staring, I am staring….

“Excuse me, fella, are you going to tee off or can we play through?” The voice is Southern US, too polite to betray annoyance. A perfectly reasonable voice with a perfectly reasonable question. I am startled.

“I’m sorry, but you’ve been looking into the trees of a couple of minutes. Mind if we play through?”

“No, no, not at all. I just got distracted. Please. Sorry.” I force a smile towards him, which earns me a nod.

I place my club politely on the grass at the rear of the tee, and as their voices behind me began the ritual banter I walk off the course toward the clubhouse. I stare straight ahead, and on the ground I fail to see a crushed red flower.

* * * * * * * * * *

I just made it back to the room ahead of the group. I brushed the grass and dirt off my clothes, hung everything up as I had remembered it, poured most of the juice from the decanter alongside my bed down the toilet, and mussed up the bedding and my hair as best I could. Even so, I earned a curious look from my wife, after she saw my flushed cheeks but could not detect any trace of a fever.

I rejoined the tribe for dinner, but cannot recall any of the conversation. I spoke only as necessary, given dispensation from joviality by reason of being under the weather. My wife’s disposition improved by reason of the attention I afforded her, and she did not guess my design as I kept her margarita glass full at cocktails and her wine glass well-stoked at dinner. As I sipped and sucked my way through the evening, the assembled hoard sopped up its usual bounty of alcohol, and my bride rode the crest of the wave. In our room, she fell promptly asleep, while allegedly waiting for me to emerge from the bathroom.

Still, I gave it lots of time. I lay down next to her so that her thrashes would encounter familiar resistance. At last, that deep and steady snore overtook her; I knew that she was out for a few hours, indeed more. I gently let myself out the door.

The taxi driver tried to tell me that golf club, and indeed the bar at the club, was long closed, but for once the ignorance of the language worked in my favor as I insisted to be driven there. On arrival, he reluctantly took my bills. He had tried, I was no longer his problem.

Rain showers had left the course drippy and redolent of greenness, but at least the sky had cleared enough for the half-moon to light my way. I walked straight down the first fairway, and over the green, straight down the second and over the hill to the third tee. I passed through the bower made by the laden branches, as wind dropped water on my shirt and hair in big cold splotches. My trouser bottoms stuck to my legs in clammy clumps.

I sat for a long time without expectation, the water soaking upwards into me. I understood implicitly that waiting was required. The winds cleared the air, and there was the smell of flowers. I closed my eyes and waited. My clothes pressed moistly all over me, and a constant sweat, a dew congealed on my arms and face. The winds then blew more constantly, but the perspiration remained, as if painted on by a broad brush. My hair matted to my skull, the wetness of the ground entering all parts of me.

When she walked out through the trees, I was not surprised. Nor was she surprised that I was there. I knew I was not the first to wait, nor the first to be taken. I did not think to ask if I would be the last. She was as described, her simple lined face left over from a gentler time. But that time had taught her peace, and she imparted it with each stroke of her hand through my soggy hair. She held the strands upwards, and her breath dried each piece into a wisp. Her hair was dark, her dress plain, the color of straw. She rubbed my neck, at the base of the skull where all the tensions connect. She touched my shoulders. She kissed my lips, gently and like a brushing, and there were flowers everywhere.

I am on a hillock overlooking the moonlit lushness. And where are the buried warriors who sat before me, kissed by this wind, at love in this myth? The guidebooks tell me that this Goddess of the Waters gave Cancun’s waves their name, gently azure and green lapping up onto the powdered sandstone beaches of this silly island.

Silver trinkets and woven blankets sold from steamy stalls, bars filled with short white skirts tight around the tans, Corona beer on the beach – these things cannot sate my lust. But I believe, I pray my Goddess can. Her face first is as Spanish as any textured line that Goya ever painted, and then spreads and darkens into stout Yucatan features guarding burning eyes of deepest brown. She sits. I hold her hand. She dances; I feel her skirt skim around my shoulders as she twirls. There are castanets; there are drums.

We make love in my mind, and her passion is an aroma on the wind. It fills all my chambers completely.

Beware the winds that carry the hint, the trace, the suggestion of the Orient. Can those winds blow this far, and come to rest upon my face? Is the Goddess of the Waters not a goddess at all, not a myth, just simply a woman of this place, of all times in this very place? Could it be that Mayan myth is not myth at all, and that Xtabay is as real as the stones, as true as the ruins, as provable as the astronomy?

* * * * * * * * *

I sat on the hill until false dawn showed over the distant sea. Some time before, she was gone. I walked half-way back to the hotel before a passing truck gave me a lift. I balled my clothes in a corner and lowered myself, cold and naked, into bed; Laura’s body nestled into mine for one chilled moment, then moved away. And I slept.

When she awoke, she was disconcerted by the crushed red flower, but I did not know how to explain.